Psychological Awareness Quotes

To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light.

I am bipolar, and I am proud. And that is why I wanted to write a book. To shine a light on mental illness, to be vulnerable about the days I let it take control and paid dearly for it, and to tell anyone fighting a similar battle: You are not alone. You are not broken.

I used to psyche myself out. Only, back then, we didn't know the word 'psyche.'

You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It's become almost impossible for someone to "go mad" in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently "went mad" and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard.

For awareness you need not go to the Himalayas; you need not go anywhere. Your life gives you enough opportunities to be aware. Somebody insults you - listen to it in full awareness. And you will be surprised - the insult is no more an insult. You may even smile. It does not hurt; it hurts only when received in unawareness. Somebody praises and appreciates you - listen with alertness. And then nobody can persuade you to do foolish things. Nobody can bribe you; flattery becomes impossible. You will smile at the whole nonsense.

I noticed that once you realize someone's watching you it's pretty hard not to find yourself watching them back.

When you realize that there's a name and a description for this condition that you thought was insanity, you've identified the problem, and now you can do something about it.

I've never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate - my father had undergone Freudian analysis - and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.

This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.

I think I'm pretty self-aware.

I'm very self-aware.

I realized two things from an early age - I was insane and had some kind of comedic thing going on. My brain was wired to think about things in terms of how funny they were.

Silence is difficult and arduous; it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware - aware of your speech, aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence.

I think acting has made me very in tune with human behavior and myself as well.

I am not very introspective.

A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves

I was so astonished that another had penetrated so deeply into the secrets of my soul, and that he knew what I did not know myself, that when I recovered from it he had already been long upon the street.

Just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, and just as we must understand functions, we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of the day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise, for we are dependent on the spirit of our time.

My parents' generation didn't have any understanding of psychology or emotion or individual temperament. In fact, they were slightly embarrassed by all those words.

All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.

I have lived one step away from losing my mind for years. I am quick and accurate in spotting unstable streaks in others.